Luggage woes: Canadian investigation finds drug smugglers switching luggage tags
Afternoon Drive with John Maytham · 3 June 2026 · 7m
Speaker 1: Imagine checking in your suitcase for your holiday, dropping it off at the desk, heaving Speaker 1: a sigh of relief in my case that you've just squeezed in underweight, watching it Speaker 1: travel down the conveyor belt and disappear into the bowels of the buget baggage handling Speaker 1: system, and not giving it a second thought. And then imagine landing in your destination Speaker 1: a foreign country, going to reclaim your bag, only to be arrested for possession of Speaker 1: drugs that you've never seen in your life, inside a bag that is not your Speaker 1: bag that you dropped off, but does have your name on the label. This is Speaker 1: exactly what has happened to now well over a dozen completely innocent travelers, particularly out Speaker 1: of Canada, travel professionals warning of this new way of duping travelers into effectively becoming Speaker 1: unwitting drug mules. And what is happening is that the criminals are simply switching the Speaker 1: tags on the luggage, so they take the name off your suitcase somewhere behind the Speaker 1: scenes, place it on their suitcase packed with cocaine or heroine or amphetamine or whatever Speaker 1: it is, and then put it onto the plane. If at the other end it Speaker 1: slips through unnoticed. Well, their person is waiting to simply pick up the suitcase and Speaker 1: walk away with it, and you receive your own suitcase and wonder what happened to Speaker 1: the name tag. But if their suitcase is picked up by the drug sniffing dogs Speaker 1: or whatever system has kicked in on the other end, well it's your name that's Speaker 1: on the suitcase full of drugs, not theirs. Now,…
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